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Canary is a hybrid of left italic antiqua and brush painted script. It provides many automated and connectable letter substitutions that can slightly shift the font into the field of lettering rather than that of rigid and mundane typography. Canary is designed to be compatible with a wide range of illustrative design practice. However, it works really well in medium-length copy settings as well.

Mark Frömberg is a Berlin-born and -bred designer who stays alive and productive with the assistance of millions of coffee beans and plenty of jolts of fizzy drinks. If his heart rate wasn't already accelerated by those things, letters, letterings, typography, and illustration would surely do the rest. Mark's style is much like the typefaces he creates: joyful, playful, and full of human warmth.

More fonts by Mark Froemberg

What was the main idea behind designing the font? What inspired its inception?
The idea derived from a type design class with Jürgen Huber. He assigned us to find a problem which could be solved by designing a particular typeface. My initial concept is based on the problem, that many fonts are not suited to be used with most editorial illustration artwork. Either they don't fit or they even reject each other. Hence, I tried to design a typeface, that can sit next to as many illustration styles as possible. The basic structure came from my writing samples I did after placing them next to a bunch of illustrative examples.

Canary is inspired by a lot. For instance, typefaces with many fancy ligatures from the last centuries and especially old original designs of italic hand scripts or writing samples like from Arrighi, Fugger, Granjon, Manutius and Tagliente. And last but not least, my own experiences with brush lettering and my passion for sign paintings have left their marks.

How did you come up with the name of the font?
Canari/Canray is a township in Corsica – which is one of my most favorite places I’ve ever been. But it also labels a nice and bright color, the familiar songbirds, the popular islands, a native american tribe in Ecuador, an earthenware jug from Africa or a type of grape from France and south America among other things. Obviously the word is kind of a romantic globetrotter what seemed to perfectly fit the versatile and joyful purposes as well as the cosmopolitan design of the typeface.

Can you describe some particular characteristics that distinguishes Canary?
The gentle back slope could be most apparent, like upright italics this is rather rarely encountered and helps to achieve a very unique appearance wherever Canary is used.

It is also uncommon for a scriptesque font to offer such a range of weights — not to mention the luxuriance of typographic tools like small caps, all kinds of number sets, catch words and multiple ampersands, ornaments and arrows.

Canary’s semi script temper results from the mixture of combined letters among unjoined ones. This provides a nearly musically rhythm depending on the language it is set in.

And Canary presents a stepwise adjustable friskiness — from sober over sweeping through to the coalesced letters of the titling ligatures or swash settings, all controlled by the user’s taste. This also applies for the alternate letters like a, e, o which will randomly change as with human writing if stylistic set 01 is activated.

And last but not least Canary has a capital Eszett beyond all question — and even a little small cap Eszett friend.

Can you tell us something about the process of developing Canary? Did it take a long time or did you face certain obstacles?
Oh yes, it took a long time indeed. The initial design began more than tree years ago and Canary matured from then on. It was a long and exhausting journey with quite a few trial and errors, thousands of ideas that resulted in a fractional amount of characters (still 1288), since many of them did not work in the framework of words — what should be considered at any stage. I developed all those ideas by hand and examined their feasibility with the computer, meaning Glyphsapp, which was actually a fluke to use. It is a very decent tool for type design and Georg Seifert responds incredibly quick if you’re either stuck or provide him with ideas to a peculiar workflow which often end up in feature improvements that make the tedious type design work a bit more passable. Thanks a lot, Georg!

What is the ideal usage of your font?
Escorting illustrative works of all kinds. And logos, signs, labelings or digital letterings. In general: applications where a human temper is desired or joyful designs which doesn’t take themselves too serious. Canary totally wants to play with you! Don’t even hesitate to set books or magazines with as many body text as you deem okay.

Have you used it much already? If so, for what kind of projects?
Unfortunately not yet, Canary is still really maiden and so fresh from the roast, that it could not be applied to real projects. This will happen from now on though. I have used it extensively for all those thousands of testing sheets and I put particularly a lot of love into the specimen booklet — its PDF is a must-download!

We noticed your website is called www.mirque.de. What does the word mean? How did you come up with it and why do you use it?
This simply evolved from my old nickname Mürk which used to be an attempt of my friends to distinguish my real name from the former currency of Germany. No one ever wrote it down back in the days, so I started to transfer it into a pseudo-french writing, since I’m fond of writing words in all kinds of ways that still maintain the pronunciation. So the word somehow became me. As opposed to using my actual name, it is not that cumbersome to remember and spell.

Finally, what are future plans and projects?
Right now, I urgently need to finish my bachelor degree, there’s not much time left to develop a chromatic type system exhausting the color overprint principle as much as possible. Besides, after my design studies I’d like to mount my freelance entity either here in Berlin or elsewhere in the world.